The night an NBA player receives their MVP trophy should be one to never forget. After all, it’s an affirmation of all his hard work and premiere status amongst his peers. I’m sure David Robinson’s still happy with his MVP trophy and two rings in the following years of his career. Yet Tuesday May 30, 1995 wasn’t one of those Hollywood MVP performances following Game 2’s pre-game ceremony.

Hakeem had his mind on takeover mode as he dropped 42 points on 19-30 shooting, 9 boards, 8 dimes and 5 blocks largely on The Admiral’s high top fade. Houston would go on to win the pivotal game 5, wrap the series back at The Summit and sweep Orlando towards back-to-back championships. Navy David got a front stage pass at the torrid run: lucky him.

Now let’s direct our attention to Hakeem’s forthcoming highlight reel from that night. Clyde had that “He’s unstoppable!” face out of “Mo Money Mo Problems” at 2:03. Bob Hill saw defeat by 3:25. Then Hakeem’s reaction to the score late in the game at 5:15?

You know how much that’s worth.

The only downside about Hakeem’s incredible performance is the lack of recognition it gets in the lexicon of big post season games. He single-handedly swung the series and title hopes in Houston’s favor all while beating two of his biggest rivals in David Robinson and Shaq. I’m also willing to bet Robinson snubbing Hakeem in his acceptance speech as one of the great bigs he played against gave Olajuwon the juice. All that lore gets lost since heads were and are still on some “but Mike wasn’t ‘back’ yet” jive talk. Sounds like sour grapes with a twist of hate to me.

NBA kiddos better pay attention. This is what 42 points on the NBA’s best interior defender looks like. Watch and save the video to your bookmarks because you’re witnessing a bygone era of low post supremacy. Lord knows when we’ll see another performance like this. (PROTIP: It won’t be anytime soon.)

yea, hakeem was surgical! they went on to beat my Orlando squad of Penny, Anderson, Scott, Grant, and Shaq. I just knew the magic was taking home a chip. My pops taught me a valuable nba watching lesson that year, “experience wins championships”. i guess what i’m trying to say is, “you had a good run, OKC. but we all knew how your story would end”.

I remember this… I was 12 and nba was on NBC still…. I miss that intro music on Sunday’s.

Dream has the best foot work for a big man and any player in general. The guy was a beast….

What’s kind of underrated about Dream is the fact that he was muslim and every year he played ball Ramadan occurred during the season yet he still dominated. I know playing basketball when one is hungry is horrible (I’ve done it) and I can only imagine playing on an empty stomach at that level is insane to me….

Great write-up. I remember this game/series distinctly, Spurs were favored in the series but Hakeem wasn’t having that at all. He went berserker barrage on Mr. Robinson. I heard a podcast with Robert Horry awhile back where he talked about Olajuwon and this game in particular, basically Hakeem felt disrespected that D Rob was MVP and it was being given out in front of Olajuwon and how he unveiled some new shit that night. I copied and pasted a transcript of what Horry said specifically about that below;

“First game, Dream looks down there, and Dream never says anything. ‘That’s my trophy. How they going to disrespect me like that and give him my trophy?’ That’s what he was saying. We all looked at Dream and were like, ‘Yeeeah! We about to roll tonight!’ Those moves Dream put on David? We had never seen (those) before. It was like he had been in a lab somewhere working on that secretly. You know guys when they see somehting and go, ‘ooooh!”? We were actually on the court going, “ooooh! Get ‘em Dream!”

I’ve held the same stance for awhile too about Houston’s chances against the Bulls in a hypothetical Finals. The Rockets had the antidote with Hakeem but we’ll unfortunately never know if that would be the case in a 7 game series. It’s another case solidifying basketball as a game of matchups.

If Ralph Sampson doesn’t get hurt and continues a natural path of progression, I’m sayin the Rockets beat the Bulls at least one of those years. How many teams have had two legitimate 7-footers who would put up 25-10? [www.basketball-reference.com]